This invention relates to analgesic compositions and methods of using them for therapeutic benefit.
Castor oil has been applied over painful areas of the body to reduce pain and inflammation. The oil instilled into a cotton flannel cloth and placed over the painful joint, tendon, nerve trunk and covered with Saran wrap is used to form an occlusive dressing. Thick turkish towelling is placed over the Saran wrap and covered with an electric heating pad, in turn kept in place by an outside towel. Under low heat, this stupe is kept on, immobilizing the patient for at least an hour twice daily. The method is effective but cumbersome, time consuming and interferes with other activities while thus engaged.
We have studied combinations of other natural oils plus excipients which were compatible with each other, safe enough to be edible, readily available and inexpensive, aiming for the over the counter market to make an anti-inflammatory treatment affordably available to the maximum number of suffering individuals. Hundreds of combinations of oils and excipients were tried, many of them laboratory failures and the others no more effective than the castor oil in stupe form, our aim being to use the product topically with no wrapping or other treatment other than topical application.
Medical literature reports the virtues of garlic and shark liver oils separately as effective anti-inflammatory agents. The active ingredients of garlic and shark liver oils have been successfully used in ancient Chinese herbal medical practice, although the manufacturing process is not known. Both garlic oil and shark liver oil separately have been reported for years in foreign, especially oriental medical journals, as being effective in inflammatory and infective illnesses. In recent American literature, the antiviral activity of garlic oil has been reported. We added these two oils to others we had previously tried and began to see improved results. Finally, when serendipitously supplied with a refined grade of shark liver oil and combining all of the ingredients under special conditions of temperatures and times, the resulting formulations produced uniformly and unexpected results in many conditions and diseases the nature of which continue to be discovered.